Under the Bisexual Umbrella: Diversity of Identity and Experience

I am pleased to introduce the special issue, “Under the Bisexual Umbrella: Diversity of Identity and Experience.” Included in this issue is a series of articles detailing many complexities within the bisexual umbrella. These complexities range from different perspectives on defining and choosing identity labels, to exploration of personal sexualities, to exploring implications of what being under the umbrella might mean for nonbisexual identities. In this introduction, I first provide a description of the bisexual umbrella, discuss how community members and researchers use it, and then delve further into the intricacies of the concept as detailed by many of the authors.

Bisexual umbrella coverage

The ‘bisexual umbrella’ is a phrase that is most commonly used to describe a range of nonmonosexual identities, behaviors, and forms of attraction. Although this includes people who identify as bisexual, it has also been used to group together bisexuality with other nonmonosexual identities, notably pansexual, queer, and fluid as discussed by many of the authors in this special issue. As Robinson writes in “Two-Spirit and Bisexual People: Different Umbrella, Same Rain,” two-spirit identity is also often brought under the umbrella. Beyond nonmonosexual identities, the umbrella is sometimes used to cover people who do not identify with a nonmonosexual identity but engage in behaviors or experience attraction to more than one gender, an experience explored by Nash in “Home-o: Being at Home with Reflections on Hetero-Homosexual Identity,” as well as purported by participants in Flanders, LeBreton, Robinson, Bian, and Caravaca-Morera (2017), “Defining Bisexuality: Young Bisexual and Pansexual People's Voices.” For some people who are included under the bisexual umbrella, it provides welcome cover and a metaphorical gathering place for a community that often feels it does not belong anywhere. For others, it may feel inappropriately applied and like an attempt to promote homogeneity where there is, in fact, anything but. There, too, are implications for researchers who choose to conceptualize bisexuality and nonmonosexuality at its broadest and most inclusive, or to create more selective inclusion criteria in their research.

One challenge of uniting nonmonosexual communities is the balancing act of being inclusive enough to avoid unintentionally excluding others, while remaining cohesive enough to move together in collective action. The bisexual umbrella serves in this purpose as a grouping device for an incredibly diverse set of individuals; some of those who are included choose to be grouped together, and for others, the choice is made for them by researchers or society at large. A step in recognizing the complexity under the bisexual umbrella is to understand that some people select bisexual and/or other nonmonosexual identities and also explicitly identify under the bisexual umbrella. Others who identify as nonmonosexual do not identify under the bisexual umbrella or only do so in certain social contexts.

Researchers and society further complicate the bisexual umbrella inclusion/exclusion criteria in ways that may have very little to do with the agency of non-monosexual people themselves. For example, some people may find identities such as pansexuality unintelligible, potentially due to and pan erasure, as discussed in Belous and Bauman's, “What's in a Name? Exploring Pansexuality Online.” In this case, pansexual people may be misidentified and grouped under the bisexual umbrella, regardless of whether they actually identify with the umbrella. In other examples, researchers may have a question that is applicable to all people who engage in sexual behavior with more than one gender (creating an expansive umbrella) whereas others may have questions specific to people who identify as bisexual and queer (creating a restrictive umbrella). The bisexual umbrella then is not a static, unchanging façade, but rather a shape-shifting construct, expanding, and constricting depending upon a variety of factors that push and pull against one another.

Bisexual umbrella benefits

If there are tensions, what are the benefits of the bisexual umbrella? First, as noted above, there are many similarities and shared experiences across disparate groups under the bisexual umbrella. One overarching issue that unites the largest number of nonmonosexual people is the monosexist culture that we exist in, that privileges and reinforces relationships and attractions to only one gender, neatly conforming to a binary system of sexuality and attraction. Brown, Montgomery, and Hammer address how perceptions held by graduate students can affect all non-monosexual people, regardless of specific identity, in “Perceptions of Individuals Who Are Non-monosexuals held by Graduate Students: A Q Methodological Study.” As noted by Lapointe in “‘It's not Pans, It's People’: Student and Teacher Perspectives on Bisexuality and Pansexuality,” though the youth interviewed in Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs) do not see pansexuality and bisexuality as interchangeable, they recognize the need for space to discuss and explore and be bisexual and/or pansexual. Further, Galupo, Ramirez, and Pulice-Farrow, state in their article, “‘Regardless of their Gender’: Descriptions of Sexual Identity among Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer Identified Individuals,” that there are more similarities than differences in the way bisexual, pansexual, and queer people conceptualize their identities. In these cases, it potentially makes sense for our different subcommunities under the umbrella to band together and advocate for recognition and inclusion of non-monosexual people. The finding that so many of us simultaneously embody multiple umbrella identities, such as bisexual and queer, further supports this union (Mitchell, Davis, & Galupo, 2015).

Second, as indicated by Mereish, Katz-Wise, and Woulfe in, “We're Here and We're Queer: Sexual Orientation and Sexual Fluidity Differences between Bisexual and Queer Women,” as well as Robinson, one area of similarity is level of income and experience of poverty between bisexual and queer women, as well as between bisexual people and two-spirit people. Research has consistently identified higher levels of poverty among bisexual and other non-monosexual groups in contrast to their monosexual peers (Gorman, Denney, Dowdy, & Medeiros, 2015; Ross et al., 2016). Poverty and income inequality may then be considered a social justice issue for individuals under the umbrella, and the greater number of people advocating for income equality, the more likely our voices are to be heard.

Another uniting factor among the wide range of people included under the umbrella is the higher vulnerability for negative health outcomes (Schick & Dodge, 2012), which is also related to income inequality (Braveman, Egerter, & Williams, 2011; Ross et al., 2016). Whether nonmonosexuality is categorized by identity or behavior, researchers consistently report higher rates of negative mental and physical health outcomes among nonmonosexual people in contrast to our monosexual peers, though how nonmonosexuality is conceptualized within research affects the overall outcomes (Bauer & Brennan, 2013). Like with income inequality, the umbrella in this case may provide a platform for a critical mass of nonmonosexual people to advocate for health policy makers, researchers, and health care service providers to consider the specific needs of non-monosexual people.

Bisexual umbrella costs

On the other hand, if there are tensions underneath the umbrella, what are the differences between groups, and what are the costs of ignoring these differences in favor of highlighting the umbrella, or the things we have in common? One area of difference, as noted by Lapointe, as well as Galupo and colleagues, is how non-monosexual people define their sexual identities, and how that differs between groups. One of the more contentious issues in this area is the insistence that bisexuality reinforces a gender binary, whereas other identities (i.e., queer and pansexual) facilitate openness to more genders beyond the binary. The complicated thing here is that rarely do people agree upon how to define or embody a single identity, much less an umbrella identity. The articles by Flanders et al. and Galupo et al. note that though many people who identify as bisexual use binary language to describe their sexuality, many also do not. Bisexual activists have been resisting the insistence that bisexuality is inherently binary for decades. The Bisexual Manifesto (Bay Area Bisexual Network, 1990), published in Anything that Moves, resisted the conceptualization of bisexuality as binary. The major bisexual advocacy groups do not define ‘bisexuality’ in binary terms. Yet the message persists. In part, this may be due to the fact that some people identify as bisexual and are only attracted to two genders. Sometimes this may be cisgender men and women, but other times it may mean cisgender women and nonbinary people. And in part, the persistence of this message may be due to people who do not identify as bisexual continuing to insist that bisexuality always and necessarily means binary attraction, erasing the experiences of many bisexual people.

Ultimately, using a bisexual umbrella is complicated because we have umbrellas within umbrellas within umbrellas. Bisexuality as a single identity encompasses so many different meanings and attractions and behaviors for people who explicitly identify as bisexual. The general identity definition most commonly used, attraction to more than one gender, then leaves room for the multitudinous expressions of that identity. And, the umbrella covers people who explicitly do not identify as bisexual but elect to be considered under the umbrella; and the umbrella is held over other individuals whose behaviors or attractions may align with the umbrella, but they do not consider themselves as a part of this group. People under the umbrella are also more likely to identify with more than one sexual identity label (Mitchell et al., 2015). Further, people under the umbrella embody so many other identities beyond sexuality, including but not limited to race, gender, ability, religion, and class, that affect their experience and equitable inclusion under the umbrella.

At the crux of these tensions is the erasure of diversity under the bisexual umbrella. It simultaneously serves as a way to create community space and to obscure the beautiful and important variances that occur within nonmonosexual communities. At its most expansive, the umbrella may enable social advocacy that would be more difficult without it, but at what cost? Do we run the risk of perpetuating similar forms of erasure underneath the umbrella that non-monosexual people experience in society generally? If so, would that form of erasure have similar health implications? Is it time to reconceptualize how we label the umbrella, and if so, can the reconceptualization be done in a way that does not undermine the visibility of non-monosexual identities and the decades of advocacy work by bisexual and other non-monosexual activists to have bisexuality recognized?

Concluding thoughts

There are many other words that we use to describe what I have been referring to as the “bisexual umbrella” and non-monosexuality. Some resist the term non-monosexuality as it defines a population by what it is not (i.e., monosexual) and prefer other identity terms that are inclusive of attraction to more than one gender, such as plurisexual (Mitchell et al., 2015), polysexual (Hutchins & Williams, 2012), pomosexual (Queen & Schimel, 1997), and multisexual. Others prefer the label of queer, though this term is problematic as an umbrella term in that it does not specify the existence of attraction to multiple genders. Given the diversity of identity and experience under the umbrella, perhaps adopting one of these other terms as an umbrella term would alleviate the tension that occurs with the constant shape shifting of the umbrella. Bisexual, pansexual, queer, fluid, and the many other identity groups could exist as they are without stretching or retracting to (un)cover others, but we could still benefit from coming together for collective action. This would certainly mean that for groups who are marginalized in the umbrella communities, such as two-spirit people, there needs to be a specific focus to let people “opt-in” as opposed to be forcefully covered. Further, as recommended by intersectional theorists (Bowleg, 2012), collective action priorities should be determined by those who experience multiple forms of marginalization to not erase the needs and experiences of Indigenous people, communities of color, people with disabilities, or people living in poverty that are a part of the community.

As an individual and a researcher, I do not know what the best answer is to accommodate these competing advantages and disadvantages of the umbrella. As an individual, I desire to live in a world in which all identities are equally respected and are given equitable space to exist, without being misidentified or erased. As a researcher, I desire to conduct meaningful work that serves to benefit as many people under the umbrella as possible. The authors in this special issue make substantial contributions to the community and intellectual conversations supporting these desires, and these contributions will hopefully further inspire the continuing conversation within and beyond our umbrella communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corey E. Flanders

Corey Flanders is an assistant professor in the department of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests focus on issues of identity and health equity, particularly as they relate to the experiences of people who are queer and trans. She uses qualitative and quantitative approaches together with community-based research principles to understand how structural, community, and individual factors affect people's health and other lived experiences.